Jessie was enchanted—with the otters, the deer, the windswept trees, the subdued luxury of their room and the spectacular view from the balcony. If she’d been asked to describe the perfect spot for a honeymoon, she couldn’t have imagined anything better. But, wonderful as the setting was, she was reasonably certain that she would have enjoyed her honeymoon just as much if they’d been camped out at a ratty motel in Death Valley. It wasn’t the cute furry animals or the crashing waves that made the world seem a new and shining place.
“Matt? Wake up.”
“No. I’m asleep,” he muttered, burying his face deeper in the pillow. “Deeply asleep.”
“I don’t believe you.” He felt the bed dip as Jessie sat down. “If you’re talking, you’re awake.”
“I’m talking in my sleep.”
“You’re lying in your sleep,” she said reprovingly. Ignoring his whimpered protests, she dragged the covers down. “It’s time to wake up.”
“What time is it?” he asked, pulling the pillow over his head without opening his eyes.
“Six o’clock.”
“In the morning?” His tone was one of horrified disbelief.
“In the morning,” she confirmed heartlessly. “Get up. You promised.”
“It was under false pretenses,” he muttered, shoving the pillow back as he rolled over and glared at her. “When you said six o’clock, I thought you were kidding.”
She looked disgustingly wide awake, he thought sourly. And cheerful.
“Come on, rise and shine.”
God, she was teetering on the brink of being chipper. Matt groaned and fell back against the pillow, still glaring at her. She was sitting on the edge of the bed, one bare foot curled under her. She was wearing a long, soft cotton skirt in a multihued print of golds and blues, and a bulky off-white sweater that hung to midthigh. Her toffee-colored hair was caught back from her face with a pair of bright blue clips. Actually, she looked kind of cute, he admitted, feeling a stir of interest.
“I didn’t sleep very well.” He gave her a pathetic look that suggested he was suffering from severe sleep deprivation. “I kept waking up last night.”
“That’s hardly my fault,” Jessie said sternly, color rising in her cheeks as if she was remembering exactly how he’d occupied his sleepless time.
“Of course it is.” He reached out to catch her hand, tugging her toward him. “What’s a man supposed to do when he wakes up in the middle of the night and finds a delectable wench draped over him like a fur coat?”
“I was not.” Jessie’s flush deepened. She pulled back against his hold. “You’re the one who woke me twice last night.”
“Three times,” he corrected her, feeling his interest—among other things—perk up at the memory. “Let’s try for four.”
“You’re insatiable.” Her cheeks were pink, but there was a look in her eyes that told him he wasn’t the only one with warm memories of the night before.
“I’m on my honeymoon,” he said, widening his eyes innocently. He tugged harder, his grin taking on a wicked edge. If he had to wake up at this ungodly hour, he might as well make the best of it. “I have certain traditions to uphold.”
“Matt, I really— Oh!” Jessie’s breath caught on a squeak as he yanked her forward, tumbling her onto his chest.
The room was quiet for a few minutes, except for a few soft sighs and one definite moan. Matt was just starting to think that waking up at six o’clock in the morning might not be completely without merit when Jessie abruptly dragged her mouth from his.
“No you don’t.” Her protest was breathless but firm. “You’re not going to distract me again.” Evading his determined hands, she scrambled off the side of the bed and stood glaring at him. “Yesterday we didn’t get out of here until noon.”
“Can I help it if you find me irresistible?” Leaning on one elbow, Matt gave her a disingenuous smile. “Come back to bed, Jessie. The Pacific will still be there later.”
“But the deer may not be.” As if compelled, Jessie’s eyes moved down his body, lingering on the muscles of his chest before following the line of hair that traced across his stomach to disappear beneath the covers draped low on his hips. Her cheeks warmed at the blatant arousal he made no attempt to conceal, but she didn’t look away.
The combination of bold interest and shy embarrassment made him want to drag her down on the bed and ravish her. Then again, over the last few days, he’d discovered that almost everything she did filled him with a similar urge. It was amazing to think that he’d known her all these years and never once felt this urge to devour her. Now he couldn’t keep his hands off her. He gauged the distance between them and decided it was too far to risk grabbing for her. A more subtle tactic was in order.
“You know, it’s very painful for a man to become aroused and then not have any…outlet for it.”
His look of quiet suffering was met with a snort of laughter. “Nice try, Latimer.” She grinned heartlessly. “Do you remember the summer I was fifteen and you caught me necking with Billy Thompson in Grandad’s gazebo?”
“The kid with no neck?” When she nodded, Matt scowled. “He had his hands under your blouse,” he muttered. The memory was surprisingly vivid. And annoying.
“Yes, but he hadn’t done anything interesting with them yet,” Jessie said with wistful regret. “And Billy was a weight lifter, which was why he was…neck impaired.”
“He was eighteen. Way too old for you.”
“You said as much at the time. Rather loudly. Do you remember what else you told me?”
“Maybe,” he admitted cautiously.
“After you scared poor Billy out of a week’s dose of steroids, you sat me down and told me all about boys and the tricks they might use to try and talk a girl into going all the way. Remember?”
Matt’s scowl deepened. He did remember.
“You told me that I shouldn’t believe any boy who told me that getting aroused and then not being able to…um…do something about it might do them irreparable harm.” She gave him a look of wide-eyed innocence. “You didn’t lie to me, did you, Matt?”
Talk about hoist on your own petard. Matt cleared his throat and tried to look as if he wasn’t wondering if there was a bra under that bulky sweater. “I didn’t lie, but it’s…different after you’re married.” She raised her eyebrows and looked doubtful. “There’s an actual chemical change that occurs in a man when he—” Her giggle made it clear that she wasn’t buying it. “Fine,” he muttered. “Don’t believe me. But you’ll be sorry when I’m writhing in agony.” The giggle became outright laughter. Her eyes danced with it, and he had to work at keeping his sulky look in place. He edged subtly closer.
“Nice try, Matt, but I don’t think you’ll suffer any permanent damage from—”
Her voice rose on a startled little shriek when he moved suddenly, one long arm snagging her around the waist to pull her down onto the bed in a tumble of long legs and soft skirts. Any protest she might have made was lost in the quick, hard possession of his kiss. When he finally lifted his head, all that emerged was a soft moan at the feel of his warm hand sliding under her sweater.
“You promised you’d get up early,” she managed to say, though the fact that she was arching into his touch made the reproach less effective than it might have been.
“Honey, if I get any more up, I’m going to explode,” he muttered. He opened the front clasp of her bra and shoved the sweater up, baring her to his gaze. And his mouth. Oh, his mouth.
“We’re not staying in bed until noon again,” she panted, her hands sliding into his hair as her back arched, offering herself to him.
“I’ll make it real quick,” he offered, startling a laugh from her. “Five minutes. I swear.”
“I’m not sure that’s a good thing,” she said breathlessly.
His hands were busy under her skirt. There was a quick, tearing sound, and he tossed her ruined panties to the floor.
“I’ll make it
a very good thing,” he promised as he lifted himself over her.
And he did.
It was considerably more than five minutes, but the morning was still young when they left their room. Matt was still grumbling about being dragged out of a warm bed and forced to tramp along a cold, rocky beach. He took every opportunity to give her a vivid demonstration of what he considered a more appropriate use of time for a honeymooning couple.
He kissed her in the stairwell. And on the steps in front of their building. He pulled her off the path and pressed her up against the trunk of a gnarled pine tree and offered a persuasive, if wordless, argument for returning to their room. And there was a conveniently placed access path between two buildings where he made one last attempt to convince her that deer and sand dunes were vastly overrated.
By the time they sat down to breakfast at a table overlooking the ocean, Jessie’s hair was tousled, her cheeks were flushed, and her breathing was not as steady as it might have been, but she’d successfully resisted temptation. She gave her order to the waiter and looked across the table at Matt. He was wearing faded jeans and a bulky off-white sweater. His dark hair brushed the collar in back and fell onto his forehead in an appealingly untidy wave. His hair had been neatly combed when they left their room, and, though she wanted to blame the wind for its tousled condition, she had a distinct memory of feeling it sliding through her fingers like dark silk during one of several stolen kisses on the way to breakfast.
Looking at him as he ordered his meal, she felt a newly familiar warmth in the pit of her stomach and wondered if maybe she shouldn’t have been quite so adamant about going for an early-morning walk. Really, deer weren’t exactly rare, after all and they had two more days to—
“You’re the one who wanted to play nature girl,” Matt commented, apparently at random, but the smug curve of his smile suggested that he knew where her thoughts had been heading.
Jessie flushed and reached for her orange juice, trying to look as if jumping his bones—again—hadn’t even crossed her mind. “There’s no point in coming to such a beautiful spot and not taking advantage of the…the beauty.”
“I thought I was doing a pretty good job of taking advantage of at least one beauty,” Matt murmured wickedly, leaning back in his chair as the waiter returned with his coffee and a basket of muffins.
Jessie sipped her juice and willed herself not to blush, both at the compliment and the warm look in his eyes. It was ridiculous. In all the years she’d known him, she couldn’t ever remember Matt making her blush. Now, all he had to do was lift an eyebrow and smile that slow smile that said he was thinking wicked thoughts and she blushed like a twelve-year-old in the throes of her first crush. It was embarrassing.
Seeking a distraction, she nodded to the strap draped over the back of his chair. “I’m glad you brought your camera. What’s the point of marrying a world-famous photographer if you don’t get any pictures of your honeymoon?”
She was reaching for a muffin as she spoke and missed seeing Matt’s suddenly arrested expression. He lowered his hand to feel the familiar contours of the camera case he hadn’t even been aware of picking up. He’d been traveling with it for so long that he’d packed it automatically, the same way he packed his shaving gear and clean socks. He hadn’t given it any thought since he’d put it in the bottom of the closet in their hotel room, but, this morning, he’d pulled his jacket off its hanger and scooped the camera case up at the same time, the way he’d done hundreds of times before in hotel rooms all over the world.
Matt fingered the battered leather case as he watched Jessie butter a muffin. The hotel restaurant was almost completely walled in glass, offering a three-hundred-sixty-degree view of sea and sand and woods. Morning sun spilled through the windows behind her, drifting softly across polished wooden floors and crisp linen tablecloths, catching in Jessie’s hair, picking out the red and gold highlights. He wanted to photograph her, Matt thought suddenly. He wanted to photograph Jessie walking barefoot on the beach, her hair windblown and wild.
“I’m surprised you’ve been able to resist the urge to pull out your camera for this long,” Jessie said. She nibbled on one edge of a blueberry muffin and smiled across the table at him. “This place is so spectacularly beautiful, you must have been dying to spend some time messing with lenses and f-stops and things.”
“I haven’t exactly been bored,” Matt said easily. He could have told her that he had a lot more experience with photographing death and destruction than spectacular scenery, but he didn’t. It wasn’t the scenery that was tugging at him now.
By dinnertime he’d gone through three rolls of film. To please Jessie, he’d taken postcard shots of deer moving daintily across the dunes and caught the wild spume of waves splashing against the rocks, the twisted trunk of a cypress. To please himself, he’d snapped shots of his wife, barefoot and windblown against the endless blue of sea and sky, of her laughing at the bold antics of the gulls, of her dabbling her toes in the chilly surge of the Pacific.
The camera felt right, so much a part of him that he was hardly aware of it in his hands, moving automatically through the steps of framing the shot, focusing and shooting. For the first time in months he felt whole, as if a part of him that had been missing had finally slipped into place again.
And that night, for the first time since he’d asked Jessie to marry him, the nightmare came back.
It felt strange to share the bedroom that had been hers since childhood. Jessie sat cross-legged in the middle of the bed and stared at the bar of light visible under the bathroom doorway. In a few minutes Matt would come through that door. She felt a sudden giddy surge of nervousness. It was ridiculous. They’d been married for a week, had shared a bed every night—and a good part of the days, for that matter. Her skin warmed at the memories, but the nerves remained. It felt different now, here in the room where she’d slept since she was a girl.
Eventually they would probably move into her grandfather’s room at the end of the hall, but his things were still in there, and she wasn’t looking forward to the task of packing everything away. If she’d known how…strange it would feel to have Matt move into her room, maybe she would have gritted her teeth and dealt with the melancholy task.
“You know, when I was sixteen, I was dating Angela Delveccio.” Jessie had been so absorbed in her thoughts that she hadn’t heard the bathroom door open, and the sound of Matt’s voice made her jump. “We were in algebra together, and every week, I’d go to her house for a study date.”
He was standing in the doorway, one shoulder leaning against the doorjamb, a fluffy, primrose-yellow towel wrapped around his hips. He looked large and male and just a little dangerous.
“Her parents let us study in her room as long as we left the door partially open. I guess they figured that would keep us from getting into trouble.”
“D-did it?” she asked.
“Even at sixteen, it’s hard to jump a girl’s bones when her mother might walk by at any minute.” But his smile had a wicked edge that made her suspect that Angela Delveccio’s bones had probably been thoroughly jumped somewhere other than in her bedroom. “But I used to have fantasies about that bedroom.”
“About her bedroom?”
“Yeah.” Matt pushed away from the doorjamb and padded barefoot across the floor to her dressing table. Long fingers sifted through the items scattered across the polished wood, pausing to lift a bottle of perfume to his nose, brushing across the plush softness of a blusher brush.
Watching him, Jessie felt a liquid heat pool low inside her. He looked almost aggressively masculine, standing there in nothing but a towel, his fingers moving among her things. Lust, she thought. That was the only word for it. This heat, this need, this hunger she felt when she saw him. It was good old-fashioned lust.
As if feeling her eyes on him, Matt turned. Leaning one hip against the dressing table, he kept those electric-blue eyes on her as he rubbed his hand across the thick mat of dark hair on
his chest. Jessie’s mouth was suddenly dry.
“Angela’s room was all pink and pretty, and it smelled like powder and perfume.” His fingers trailed lower, following the line of hair that cut across his flat stomach. Jessie forgot how to breathe. “It smelled like girl, and I used to fantasize about the two of us all alone in that pretty room, about having her there on that pretty flowered bedspread.” He ran his thumb just inside the edge of the towel, loosening it so that it dipped lower across his hips, barely concealing the rigid length of his erection.
“There…there’s flowers on my bedspread,” Jessie managed to say. He hadn’t even touched her, but her whole body was humming with need.
“I’d noticed.” He gave her that slow, wicked smile that melted her bones. “I don’t suppose you’d be interested in making an old fantasy come true, would you?”
The towel dropped away, and Jessie’s breath left her on a soft sigh. She had to swallow twice before she could find her voice. “I’m not Angela Delveccio.”
He crossed the room in three long strides, his hands hard and urgent as he pressed her back against the floral bedspread, his body taut as he came down over her.
“Angela who?” he asked against her mouth.
Common wisdom had it that the first few weeks of marriage were often difficult, fraught with strain as the newlyweds worked to adjust to the reality of sharing their lives. Matt had read enough pop psychology to know that there was supposed to be tension, quarrels, maybe even a few tears. He was supposed to be suffering from the sudden curtailment of his legendary bachelor freedom. But it was difficult to feel curtailed when he was so damned comfortable. Hard to long for the empty impersonal surroundings of his apartment when he was surrounded by the warmth and welcome of a real home. Difficult to mourn solitary TV dinners and fast food when Jessie took such delight in cooking every night. Impossible to feel any nostalgia for all the endless hours, days, weeks, years he’d spent alone when he now had someone to share his life with.
Loving Jessie Page 20
